Blogger to WordPress: how to migrate your blog to WordPress painlessly

Blogger.com is one of the most popular blogging platforms that gained quick traction amongst those wanting to start blogging for the first time. As it costs literally nothing to start a blog, Blogger.com made an easy entry to blogging for everyone. A few years ago especially, it was all the rage, everything was blogging all over Blogger. It was eventually acquired by Google.

We remember the time when we also used to run a blog on Blogger, we won’t share the URL though, we’re somewhat embarrassed of those days :)

Although, Blogger.com has an extensive set of features for a novice blogger, it might not be a good fit for everyone especially for those who require a blog with advanced customization options.

So as you grow as a blogger, you might want to move your blog from Blogger to WordPress.Switching your blogging platform can be scary. No one wants to risk losing their hard earned traffic and search engine rankings while migrating the blog from Blogger to Wordpress.. In this article, we’ll guide you on how to migrate your blog from blogger to WordPress step by step without losing traffic and search engine juice.

Goals:

Import Blogger posts and images to Wordpress self-hosted blog

Keep same URL for posts

Maintain search engine rankings by redirecting traffic from old blog to new blog

NB: Try this on a development environment first to make sure you’ve got the nitty gritty details right. You don’t want to crash and burn in the middle of a migration. Don’t rush this, think it through well.

Step #1: Install WordPress on your host

If you didn’t set a custom domain on your Blogger.com blog, you will need to install WordPress on your host as the first step. These days, almost every major hosting sites support one-click installation of WordPress. So this step should not be that hard.

If you did set a custom domain, you’ll need to install WordPress on a temporary URL on your host and change the DNS settings after the complete migration. As setting temporary URL differs for each host, you will need to look for your hosting company’s tutorial for this.

Typically, this involves going to the DNS Zone Editor

Step #2: Import data from Blogger to WordPress

Before importing data to WordPress, make sure your permalinks are similar (or actually identical) to the Blogger permalink structure.

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings >> Permalinks >> and choose custom structureAdd the below value to the custom structure field and save it.

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

After defining the permalinks structure, you can start importing data from Blogger.com. By default, WordPress comes with a built-in tool for importing data from Blogger.com.

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Tools>> Import>> Install. Once you installed the importer plugin, you’ll need to activate it and run the importer. WordPress will then ask your permission to manage your Blogger account

Click ‘allow access’.If you are running more than one blog, select which blog you would like to import to your WordPress. Once you are done, you can see the categories, posts, and comments are being imported to your WordPress.

Step #3: Making WordPress permalinks look identical to that of Blogger

If you carefully analyzed the permalinks of the blog posts you just imported to WordPress, you’ll see that the structure of WordPress permalinks and Blogger permalinks are same, but still the post URL are identical. Since our goal while migrating is not to lose the traffic or search rankings, we’ll need to make the URL structure look exactly the same even after the migration.

Follow the below steps to make the WordPress permalinks look identical to Blogger.Add the following code to a PHP file and save it as fix.php. Then, upload it to the root directory.

Step #4: Import gadgets and redirect the pages

The default WordPress importer cannot import the pages and gadgets from the Blogger.com. So you’ll need to import both pages and gadgets manually by copying and pasting the code to your WordPress.

As you can see, in both the platforms the URL structures of the pages are different. However, after copying the pages to WordPress you can use the WordPress redirection plugin for manually redirecting the pages without losing the traffic.

That is, before migration here’s how the URL of the page will look like on Blogger.com: http://example.com/p/pageUsing the redirection plugin, the above URL can be redirected to the following WordPress page URL: http://example.com/page

Step #5: Redirect the blogspot post URL to the exact WordPress posts

Although, all the posts and pages of your custom domain are redirecting to its exact page, you can still see that the default blogspot URL isn’t successfully redirecting to its exact URL. That is, ‘example.blogspot.com/blog-post’ is not currently redirecting to ‘CustomDomain.com/blog-post’ but to the homepage.So the goal of this step is to set up 1-to-1 mapping between the blogspot posts to your WordPress posts.

Install this plugin and activate it. Then, follow the plugin set up guide given below.

Step 1: Under Tools, click Blogger to WordPress Redirection.

Step 2: Now you'll see the configuration page of the plugin. Click 'start configuration'.

Step 3: Click on get code. Now, you'll find a template code that has to be inserted into your Blogger.com template.

If you didn’t set the custom domain on your Blogger blog, you can see your old blog is now successfully redirecting to WordPress. If you did set custom domain, you can change the temporary URL to actual URL, and change the DNS settings accordingly.

And that’s it - you should now have been able to migrate your blogger Wordpress whilst maintaining the goals at the top of the post!

One more thing... Did you know that people who share useful stuff like this post look AWESOME too? ;-) Please leave a useful comment with your thoughts, then share this on your Facebook group(s) who would find this useful and let's reap the benefits together. Thank you for sharing and being nice!

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